Backlit by the sun, Pluto’s atmosphere rings its silhouette like a luminous halo in this image taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft around midnight EDT on July 15. This global portrait of the atmosphere was captured when the spacecraft was about 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Pluto and shows structures as small as 12 miles across. The image, delivered to Earth on July 23, is displayed with north at the top of the frame.

NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the “habitable zone” around a sun-like star.

“This discovery and the introduction of 11 other new small habitable zone candidate planets mark another milestone in the journey to finding another Earth,” reads the NASA news release today. Space truth, more awesome than fiction.

This artist's concept depicts one possible appearance of the planet Kepler-452b, the first near-Earth-size world to be found in the habitable zone of star that is similar to our sun. Larger size here. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

Here's the rest of the annnouncement.

The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone -- the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet -- of a G2-type star, like our sun. The confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030.

"On the 20th anniversary year of the discovery that proved other suns host planets, the Kepler exoplanet explorer has discovered a planet and star which most closely resemble the Earth and our Sun," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “This exciting result brings us one step closer to finding an Earth 2.0."

Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have a good chance of being rocky.

While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.

“We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin to Earth, providing an opportunity to understand and reflect upon Earth’s evolving environment," said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who led the team that discovered Kepler-452b. "It’s awe-inspiring to consider that this planet has spent 6 billion years in the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth. That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet.”

To help confirm the finding and better determine the properties of the Kepler-452 system, the team conducted ground-based observations at the University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory, the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona, and the W. M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. These measurements were key for the researchers to confirm the planetary nature of Kepler-452b, to refine the size and brightness of its host star and to better pin down the size of the planet and its orbit.

The Kepler-452 system is located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The research paper reporting this finding has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.

In addition to confirming Kepler-452b, the Kepler team has increased the number of new exoplanet candidates by 521 from their analysis of observations conducted from May 2009 to May 2013, raising the number of planet candidates detected by the Kepler mission to 4,696. Candidates require follow-up observations and analysis to verify they are actual planets.

Twelve of the new planet candidates have diameters between one to two times that of Earth, and orbit in their star's habitable zone. Of these, nine orbit stars that are similar to our sun in size and temperature.

“We've been able to fully automate our process of identifying planet candidates, which means we can finally assess every transit signal in the entire Kepler dataset quickly and uniformly,” said Jeff Coughlin, Kepler scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who led the analysis of a new candidate catalog. “This gives astronomers a statistically sound population of planet candidates to accurately determine the number of small, possibly rocky planets like Earth in our Milky Way galaxy.”

These findings, presented in the seventh Kepler Candidate Catalog, will be submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. These findings are derived from data publically available on the NASA Exoplanet Archive.

Scientists now are producing the last catalog based on the original Kepler mission’s four-year data set. The final analysis will be conducted using sophisticated software that is increasingly sensitive to the tiny telltale signatures of Earth-size planets.

Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

This size and scale of the Kepler-452 system compared alongside the Kepler-186 system and the solar system. Kepler-186 is a miniature solar system that would fit entirely inside the orbit of Mercury. Larger size here. NASA/JPL-CalTech/R. Hurt

There are 4,696 planet candidates now known with the release of the seventh Kepler planet candidate catalog - an increase of 521 since the release of the previous catalog in January 2015. Larger size here. NASA/W. Stenzel

Since Kepler launched in 2009, twelve planets less than twice the size of Earth have been discovered in the habitable zones of their stars. Larger size here. NASA/N. Batalha and W. Stenzel

http://boingboing.net/2015/07/17/national-geographics-pluto-i.html/feed0How we know what atmosphere is like on a planet outside our solar systemhttp://boingboing.net/2013/12/03/how-we-know-what-atmosphere-is.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/12/03/how-we-know-what-atmosphere-is.html#commentsWed, 04 Dec 2013 00:53:59 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=272070WASP-19b is an exoplanet whose atmosphere is probably super hot and super poisonous — filled with methane and hydrogen cyanide instead of water.]]>

WASP-19b is an exoplanet whose atmosphere is probably super hot and super poisonous — filled with methane and hydrogen cyanide instead of water. This video explains how astronomers can even begin to guess at the composition of the atmospheres of far away worlds. (Bonus: A soothing elevator music soundtrack!)

]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/12/03/how-we-know-what-atmosphere-is.html/feed0NASA's Kepler may rise againhttp://boingboing.net/2013/11/27/nasas-kepler-may-rise-again.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/11/27/nasas-kepler-may-rise-again.html#commentsWed, 27 Nov 2013 14:21:39 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=270778NASA has a plan that could allow the telescope to keep working, great news given the fact that all the rest of its hardware is still in good order. Excelsior! ]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/11/27/nasas-kepler-may-rise-again.html/feed0"Impossible world" observedhttp://boingboing.net/2013/11/04/impossible-world-observed.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/11/04/impossible-world-observed.html#commentsMon, 04 Nov 2013 16:50:57 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=266056This rocky world, 700 light years away, might have been another Earth. Twenty percent wider, with not quite twice the mass, its density is almost the same. At just 1.5m kilometers from its star, however, Kepler-78b's surface roasts at a caustic 2,000 degrees Celsius and completes three orbits in every Earth day]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/11/04/impossible-world-observed.html/feed0The least desirable addresses in the Universehttp://boingboing.net/2013/07/26/the-least-desirable-addresses.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/07/26/the-least-desirable-addresses.html#commentsFri, 26 Jul 2013 19:36:01 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=245730Can I interest you in a summer home on COROT-7b? Sure, the estimated surface temperature is 4,580 degrees F, the year is only 20 hours long, and it's probably just lousy with volcanoes.]]>Can I interest you in a summer home on COROT-7b? Sure, the estimated surface temperature is 4,580 degrees F, the year is only 20 hours long, and it's probably just lousy with volcanoes. But, when it rains on COROT-7b, it rains rocks. No takers? Just in case, you should check out Lee Billings' slideshow on fantastically horrible planets.]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/07/26/the-least-desirable-addresses.html/feed0Interstellar message in a bottlehttp://boingboing.net/2013/06/12/interstellar-message-in-a-bott.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/06/12/interstellar-message-in-a-bott.html#commentsWed, 12 Jun 2013 21:21:07 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=235710scientists will start sending the first continuous mass hailing beacon into outer space — a sort of "Hey, you!]]>scientists will start sending the first continuous mass hailing beacon into outer space — a sort of "Hey, you! Yeah, you! Here we are!" message that researchers hope will attract the attention of any intelligent life that happens to exist in the Universe. They're aiming it at the Gliese 526 system, about 17.6 light years away. It's worth noting that this is different than Gliese 581, a system you probably remember hearing about from the search for Earth-like planets. The two systems aren't even closely related. The name comes from a 1957 survey of (relatively) nearby stars.]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/06/12/interstellar-message-in-a-bott.html/feed9Kepler's greatest hitshttp://boingboing.net/2013/05/16/keplers-greatest-hits.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/05/16/keplers-greatest-hits.html#commentsThu, 16 May 2013 15:48:13 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=230666Your guide to the most awesome exoplanets yet found by NASA's Kepler space telescope — all in one handy place, thanks to Wired's Adam Mann.]]>Your guide to the most awesome exoplanets yet found by NASA's Kepler space telescope — all in one handy place, thanks to Wired's Adam Mann. ]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/05/16/keplers-greatest-hits.html/feed1Kepler space telescope discovers a BEER planethttp://boingboing.net/2013/05/14/einsteins-beer-planet.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/05/14/einsteins-beer-planet.html#commentsTue, 14 May 2013 18:21:59 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=230197Ian O'Neill explains at Discovery.com.]]>http://boingboing.net/2013/05/14/einsteins-beer-planet.html/feed9The Earthiest planets in the universe (that we know of)http://boingboing.net/2013/04/24/the-earthiest-planets-in-the-u.html
http://boingboing.net/2013/04/24/the-earthiest-planets-in-the-u.html#commentsWed, 24 Apr 2013 18:43:44 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=226476

What I like about this chart is that it kind of shows you how "Earth-like" doesn't really mean, "Man, that is totally exactly like Earth." Instead, you should translate it more as, "Welp, this is about the closest to Earth that we've found so far." Even Kepler-62e, as you can see, is much larger than the Earth and Mars. And size matters when it comes to actual habitability. As does density — and we don't know what Kepler-62e is made of yet. It's also worth noting that #2 on this list, the infamous Gleise 581g, is really a planet candidate, rather than a planet. We aren't actually certain it exists, just yet.

Popular Science has a neat little breakdown explaining what life might be like on Kepler-62e, if we could go there. But it's worth keeping the context in mind on these Earth-like planets. Don't pack your bags just yet.

At his Psychology Today blog, Michael Chorost delves into a question about exoplanets that I've not really thought much about before — how easy they would be to leave.

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At his Psychology Today blog, Michael Chorost delves into a question about exoplanets that I've not really thought much about before — how easy they would be to leave.

Many of the potentially habitable exoplanets that we've found — the ones we call "Earth-like" — are actually a lot bigger than Earth. That fact has an effect — both on how actually habitable those planets would be for us humans and how easily any native civilizations that developed could slip the surly bonds of gravity and make it to outer space.

The good news, says Chorost is that the change in surface gravity wouldn't be as large as you might guess, even for planets much bigger than Earth. The bad news: Even a relatively small increase in surface gravity can mean a big increase in how fast a rocket would have to be going in order to leave the planet. It starts with one equation — SG=M/R^2.

Let’s try it with [exoplanet] HD 40307g, using data from the Habitable Exoplanet Catalog. Mass, 8.2 Earths. Radius, 2.4 times that of Earth. That gets you a surface gravity of 1.42 times Earth.

... it’s amazingly easy to imagine a super-Earth with a comfortable gravity. If a planet had eight Earth masses and 2.83 times the radius, its surface gravity would be exactly 1g. This is the “Fictional Planet” at the bottom of the table. Fictional Planet would be huge by Earth standards, with a circumference of 70,400 miles and an area eight times larger.

Does that mean we could land and take off with exactly the same technology we use here, assuming the atmosphere is similar? Actually, no. Another blogger, who who goes by the moniker SpaceColonizer, pointed out that Fictional Planet has a higher escape velocity than Earth. Put simply, escape velocity is how fast you have to go away from a planet to ensure that gravity can never bring you back. For Earth, escape velocity is about 25,000 miles per hour. Fictional Planet has an escape velocity 68% higher. That’s 42,000 miles per hour.

Earlier this week, we learned that there is (most likely) at least one planet orbiting the star Alpha Centauri B. If you want to get really in-depth on this discovery, how it was made, and what it means, you should be reading Paul Gilster's Centauri Dreams blog.

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Earlier this week, we learned that there is (most likely) at least one planet orbiting the star Alpha Centauri B. If you want to get really in-depth on this discovery, how it was made, and what it means, you should be reading Paul Gilster's Centauri Dreams blog.

I wanted to highlight this image, specifically, in order to quote some particularly evocative writing that Gilster posted yesterday. Cue the stirring music:

When planet-hunter Greg Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz) took his turn at the recent press conference announcing the Alpha Centauri B findings, he used the occasion to make a unique visual comparison. One image showed the planet Saturn over the limb of the Moon. Think of this as the Galilean baseline, for when Galileo went to work on the heavens with his first telescope, the Moon was visually close at hand and Saturn a mysterious, blurry object with apparent side-lobes.

Laughlin contrasted that with [this image], showing the Alpha Centauri stars as viewed from Saturn, a spectacular vista including the planet and the tantalizing stellar neighbors beyond. Four hundred years after Galileo, we thus define what we can do — a probe of Saturn — and we have the image of a much more distant destination we’d like to know a lot more about. The findings of the Geneva team take us a giant step in that direction, revealing a small world of roughly Earth mass in a tight three-day orbit around a star a little smaller and a little more orange than the Sun. What comes next is truly interesting, both for what is implied and for what we are capable of doing.

Read the rest of this post, which explains what happens next with the research and why astronomers will be focusing their planet-hunting efforts on Alpha Centauri B.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2012/10/18/the-binary-stars-of-alpha-cent.html/feed9Why you should care about the planet found orbiting Alpha Centauri, even though it's not a good place to livehttp://boingboing.net/2012/10/17/why-you-should-care-about-the.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/10/17/why-you-should-care-about-the.html#commentsWed, 17 Oct 2012 12:04:18 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=188029

Last night, astronomers with the European Southern Observatory announced that they'd found a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B — an orange star a little smaller and a little less bright than our own Sun.

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Last night, astronomers with the European Southern Observatory announced that they'd found a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B — an orange star a little smaller and a little less bright than our own Sun. That's important, because, while more than 700 planets have been found outside our solar system, this one — Alpha Centauri Bb (yeah, I know) — is by far the closest. To give you an idea of what we're talking about in distance here, imagine that we are Kansas City and Mars is Toledo. Alpha Centauri Bb is like Tokyo — but you have to get there the long way around and nobody has invented the boat or the plane yet. Basically, it's closer than any other planet we know of outside our solar system, but not really close close. Just 4.37 light years is still more than 25 trillion miles, which is still a long ways away.

Likewise, Alpha Centauri Bb is classified as an "Earth-like" planet, but that shouldn't give you any ideas of colonizing it Zefram Cochrane-style. Bb is way too close to its star for that — closer, even, than Mercury is to our own Sun.

But you should still be excited about this. Terrible, filing-cabinet name aside, Alpha Centauri Bb is jeffing epic. Until now, we didn't think our closest neighboring solar system had any planets at all. And because of the way planets work, writes Lee Billings at the Centauri Dreams blog, this single find means we're much, much more likely to discover other Centaurian worlds. Billings is a former guest blogger here at BoingBoing and his work on exoplanets is second to none. I highly recommend reading his full piece:

Anyone in the Southern Hemisphere can look up on a clear night and easily see Alpha Centauri — to the naked eye, the three suns merge into one of the brightest stars in Earth’s sky, a single golden point piercing the foot of the constellation Centaurus, a few degrees away from the Southern Cross. In galactic terms, the new planet we’ve found there is so very near our own that its night sky shares most of Earth’s constellations. From the planet’s broiling surface, one could see familiar sights such as the Big Dipper and Orion the Hunter, looking just as they do to our eyes here.

It's often hard to find the funding necessary to support this kind of research, and crowd funding is a great way to leverage public interest in science. Better yet, there's now a whole crowd-funding website dedicated specifically to the sciences.

Partially, his research is about understanding the universe. Knowing more about exomoons will teach us a lot about how solar systems, in general, work. But it's also about that tickly, exciting possibility of life on other planets. As we all learned from watching Return of the Jedi, it is possible to have a habitable moon. So far, the search for habitable exoplanets hasn't taken moons into consideration. Kipping's study would change that. But to make it work, he needs to buy a supercomputer. And for that, he needs your help. Kipping is within $3500 of his goal and has 14 days left to go.

]]>http://boingboing.net/2012/03/19/crowdfunding-the-hunt-for-habi.html/feed7A trip through space, on your iPadhttp://boingboing.net/2012/03/05/a-trip-through-space-on-your.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/03/05/a-trip-through-space-on-your.html#commentsMon, 05 Mar 2012 20:38:34 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=147193Sean Carroll thinks you will (mostly) dig Journey to the Exoplanets, a new e-book app from Scientific American.]]>Sean Carroll thinks you will (mostly) dig Journey to the Exoplanets, a new e-book app from Scientific American. The downside: Lots of information, and no search function. ]]>http://boingboing.net/2012/03/05/a-trip-through-space-on-your.html/feed0Potentially habitable exoplanet: The fine printhttp://boingboing.net/2011/12/06/potentially-habitable-exoplane.html
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/06/potentially-habitable-exoplane.html#commentsTue, 06 Dec 2011 16:58:58 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=132999

Kepler-22b is a newly confirmed exoplanet, orbiting a Sun-like star 600 light years away from Earth. The exoplanet sits in the "habitable zone"—a range of orbits around a star that are, based on what we know about life on Earth, most likely to provide the right conditions for life to happen.

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Kepler-22b is a newly confirmed exoplanet, orbiting a Sun-like star 600 light years away from Earth. The exoplanet sits in the "habitable zone"—a range of orbits around a star that are, based on what we know about life on Earth, most likely to provide the right conditions for life to happen.

That is pretty damn cool. But it does not mean there must be life on Kepler-22b. As Phil Plait explains on the Bad Astronomy blog, there's a lot we don't know about this exoplanet yet, and "within the habitable zone" is not a guarantee of habitability. Case in point: Our solar system. Earth is within the Sun's habitable zone. But so are Mars and Venus, and you may have noticed that they are not especially teeming with life.

Kepler detects planets when they transit their star, passing directly in front of the star, blocking its light a little bit. The bigger the planet, the more light it blocks. The astronomers going over the data determined that Kepler-22b is about 2.4 times bigger than the Earth. The problem is, that and its distance from its star are all we know. We don’t know if it’s a rocky world, a gaseous one, or what. It may not even have an atmosphere!

Another good post to read on this subject is Matthew Francis' explanation of "habitability" on the Galileo's Pendulum blog. Even the statement, "Kepler 22-b is within the habitable zone," comes along with a lot of assumptions that may or may not turn out to be true.

The following factors are needed to calculate whether a planet is in the habitable zone: The temperature of the host star: the hotter the star, the more it emits light of all wavelengths ... The size of the host star: a large star emits more light from its surface simply because there is more surface area ... The albedo of the planet: how much light gets reflected back into space ... Hand in hand with albedo comes the composition of the planet’s atmosphere—if it has one.

When we say Kepler-22b is in the habitable zone, we're assuming that it has the same atmospheric composition and albedo as Earth. We don't know that. And it's a big leap, bearing in mind (again) that there's not even another planet in our own solar system that shares those characteristics.

I swear, I'm not a fun-hater. Kepler-22b is awesome. Just keep it in context and know that there's still a lot we don't know about this thing.

It's hard to illustrate articles about exoplanet research. The pictures from deep-space telescopes just doesn't really look the way your readers want it to look.

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It's hard to illustrate articles about exoplanet research. The pictures from deep-space telescopes just doesn't really look the way your readers want it to look. Instead of an image of a mysterious far-off planet that people can imagine themselves visiting, you get a little blip in the light of a distant star and reams of computer modeling data.

That's why space scientists love artistic renderings—man-made illustrations meant to give you an impression of what an exoplanet might look like. But where do those pictures come from? And how accurate are they? To answer those questions, Txchnologist has a really interesting profile of Dr. Robert Hurt and Tim Pyle, the artists behind most of the artistic renderings you see decorating astronomy news.

Hurt will try to boil the data down to its visual essence and work with Pyle to make sure the image accords with what science knows about it. It’s often possible to glean the planet’s colors based on the content of its atmosphere but much is left to the artists’ imagination and what they want to convey.

“If you want to sell the idea that the planet is the size of Jupiter, you might give it a Jupiter-like storm,” Hurt said, referring to the Great Red Spot.

NASA wanted to link the real binary star system to the fictional Tatooine of Star Wars and even invited a visual effects supervisor who had worked on the movie to the press conference. So at the last minute, the artists decided to switch the position of the suns so the yellow star was higher in the sky, as it is in the movie. The switch meant the lighting pattern on the planet was slightly off, which Hurt heard about from at least one stickler. (There was no scientific reason for the stars to be aligned one way or the other, just artistic preference, Hurt said.)

For the record: Txchnologist is a science news site that's funded by GE, but they aren't strictly an ad for GE. I've chosen to link to them because they have some neat stories that don't seem to be driven by marketing or heavily biased. But I wanted to let you know what's up with the site, in case you stumble across something there that is more promotion-ish.

The Kepler space telescope has found a new, fun discovery that promises years of great Star Wars jokes. Kepler-16b is a planet that represents a type of system we've never seen before—at least, in the real world. Two hundred light years away, this Saturn-size ball of rock and gas is orbiting two stars at once. Yes, just like Tatooine.

And while there are two stars involved in heating the planet, their light is pretty feeble. Even at its distance of a little over 100 million kilometers (65 million miles) from the pair — roughly the same distance at which Venus orbits the Sun — Kepler-16b is cold: the temperature at its cloud tops (assuming it’s a gas giant like Saturn) would be at best -70°C (-100°F).

So any visions you have of Luke Skywalker standing in the desert with his leg resting on a rock while he wistfully watches the two suns set in the west may have to wait. Even if the planet has a big moon (which these observations cannot yet detect) conditions there would be a bit chillier than on Tatooine. More like Hoth.

The video above is a stream of the Kepler 16b press conference. You can also find that video online at this link.